


He Plants It For Posterity

by spaceleviathan



Category: Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-08-16 01:13:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8080969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceleviathan/pseuds/spaceleviathan
Summary: The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living - Marcus Tullius Cicero





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was planned and mostly written by the time S3 started.

Mischa didn’t have any single clear memory of her father.

Of her childhood she could recall only flashes of brown hair and solid, feminine laughter, but that was likely an artefact of the mother who was still around to laugh. Her mother, who still isolated herself in Southern America and called over Skype every other evening, telling Mischa she wasn’t getting enough sun, laughing into her wine glass at her vile jokes, biting her tongue and regretting her words. Mischa loved her dearly, from the crow’s feet around her eyes to the ever-practical shoes on her feet. _Your father would hate them_ , she would tell Mischa, who didn’t know what her father would or wouldn’t like, but knew she hated them too. _He always thought I had cheap taste._

Mischa imagined, rarely, what it must be like to remember him. He hadn’t died until she was six, and theorised that somewhere deep in the recesses of her mind there was something of him waiting; sometimes when she was drifting to sleep she could feel large surgeon’s hands swiping at her brow. She would watch the skies on clear days, lying down on the grass in her back garden, and remember Tuscany and Salzburg and Luxor, and there was a voice speaking French and Spanish and Italian, and it wasn’t her mother’s.

She had seen the standard mug-shots, and a few sound-clips, but she didn’t like to look at the pictures, or listen to the interviews. She already saw him in the mirror every morning. It had to be him, because she shared very little in common with her mother. Her mother had a strong bone structure: wide and sturdy. Mischa was narrower, sharper, stranger. Her eyes were small and her mouth was long and her nose sloped. Her mother told her every day, when she was a little girl, and even now when she could touch her face, how beautiful she was. Mischa had never disbelieved her. But beauty can be mistaken for ugliness, and ugliness was not on the skin but underneath.

Mischa, therefore, was ugly by association. Whilst she often got away with it in naïve parties, people who knew her name couldn’t help but see her father; she frightened people who had met him before. Perhaps she didn’t remember him because she didn’t want to. What she remembered instead was her first day of school, soon after her father’s death, with a surname that wasn’t her own, and her mother straying no farther than just outside of the parking lot, ready to jump to the rescue at the first sign of trouble. Mischa didn’t understand then what was wrong. She found out later, when she’d forgotten her pseudonym, and her European beginnings ended when her mother was extradited to America and people started to look at Mischa like she was a beast.

Even now, Mischa could hardly comprehend how her mother had weaved herself out of that messy web of laws; there had been lawyers that only the elite could buy, and an older woman with solid gold at her neck, whom her mother knew by name. She briefly appeared to show her support and Mischa could remember her hands as they patted her head. She wondered often whether she’d gotten the feeling of their gentle palms mixed up. Margot Verger had been tense and _in_ tense, with her thick fur collar and her six-inch heels, and Mischa would have been scared of her if the woman hadn’t grinned broadly upon spying the little girl she had been, handing her a candy treat.

“I heard about your tiny one,” Mischa may have imagined Verger telling her mother, and she had always assumed it had been a joke. “Who knew he had it in him at his age.”

Her father had been stately with age at the time of his death. It was always coming, which Mischa knew only later, and her mother had always been counting down. One day he was there, and then he wasn’t, and Mischa couldn’t remember him but she remembered his absence. She remembered that the kitchen was cold, and her mother was always so angry, and her father, she could only conclude, had been the warmth of the fire and the balm to soothe the fury her mother stored in her breast.

Nowadays, her mother drowned what she felt in wine and sometimes threatened to burn the house down after she’d attempt to cook. “Everything tastes like dust,” she’d say, and Mischa wished she didn’t know what she meant.

-

Mischa lived in the middle of an apartment block, and measured too high to safely jump and too low jump effectively. She revelled in the chatter from above and below. Sometimes she lay down in the silence of her rooms with closed eyes and listened to the muffled conversations through the floor. A couple lived downstairs and they wanted a child, and Mischa could only guess why they didn’t already have one. They shouted at each other once a week out of frustration, slammed doors and threw open the windows so they could both chain smoke at different times. The smell drifted up to Mischa’s flat, and she associated it with normal problems and normal people.

“What’s normal?” Her mother told her, over a long-distance conversation where they’re both weary and alone and disappointed. “Is normal living on my own for twenty years, chasing after one nut-job after another?”

“Is it?”

“It didn’t feel any less normal than living here,” she glanced around her wide-open living room and comfortable furniture, the beauty she immersed herself in and never became. “Or living with your father and you. Normal depends on the person.”

“So feeling lonely is normal.”

“The most natural state of humanity,” Her mother agreed. “Maybe you could make some friends.”

As if Mischa hadn’t considered that, as if her mother didn’t know she’d tried. Clubs and hobbies and interests, but all they had caused was frustration and fury. Mischa could step towards discovering something wonderful and would then be reminded of something she couldn’t put words to; a feeling at the sound of a harpsichord, or the wonder of the theatre made ashy by the socialites wearing expensive suits and empty smiles.

She wonders whether she’s angry at him for pre-emptively tainting everything beautiful, or at herself for letting him.

-

He disappeared one day, and when she asked her mother years later what had happened, Mischa was told that he had simply gone to a market in town and hadn’t come home. The next morning her mother had them both packed up with a single bag of their belongings and her gun, and they were across the border before the sun rose. Mischa had slept most of the first journey, cried for her father over the following two days, and they’d resettled in a little apartment after a week of grubby hotels and bad food. Mischa of the then became sick – she was unused to anything other than her father’s cooking. Mischa of the now ate entirely too many things that came out of cans.

Her mother had been asked to identify the body when they’d both been shipped back to America. They’d kept him on ice, wanted to open his head and look at his brain, but pretended they didn’t whilst his wife and daughter were within earshot. Mischa’s mother never told them _no_ , and they treated the absence of denial as acquiescence. They still had it in a jar somewhere, Mischa knew, treated and preserved: the mind of a monster.

He’d never disappear completely, no matter how much Mischa might wish him away. There were museums, books, films, documentaries. He was invasive, unavoidable, the inescapable centre of her life. Her mother had always warned her: _no one needs to know_ , no matter if that was her past or her address.

Her landlady, Mrs O’Conners, was jaded enough to either not notice or not care, but she was the only one who knew Mischa’s full name. Few people had her number or even an email to keep in touch with her. Mischa couldn’t bring herself to trust the pizza man to not go running to the newspaper on the off-chance she was recognised. Her mother told her to come back home, because in the end all Mischa was doing in America was wallowing alone. Instead she drew, got rubber shavings under her nails and paint splatters in her hair, and she pretended it was like a conversation.

She savoured anything real, no matter how brief, and hoarded moments in her mind to revisit on stormy nights. She could steal time from strangers, people she met in the coffee line, where she didn’t have to introduce herself formally. She sometimes made temporary friends, throwing herself into their lives for an hour, perhaps two. She made herself seem friendly and outgoing. She didn’t linger on how often she was driven to desperation just to have a dreary talk about the weather. She didn’t have work mates, or drink mates, or extended family. Just her mother, who tutted when Mischa told her she was bored or lonely or borderline suicidal. “Come home,” she’d say, as usual, as if either of them wanted that.

Mischa was used to the reactions when the people she liked best inevitably found her out. Hers was a name that was at the back of everyone’s mind; the taboo that people couldn’t stomach _._ A surname she couldn’t live down. She could switch it, change it, but anticipated her mother’s devastation. She hadn’t kept a lot from Mischa’s father – they had left so quickly and all her mother had packed was a pair of cufflinks, a knife and a few rolls of paper. She’d taken the name, Mischa’s name, and it was certainly an effective technique to ensure neither of them ever escaped his shadow.

Her mother didn’t always like to talk about it. Sometimes she’d get a sour look on her face, huff and sigh over Mischa’s questions, answer with cropped and snappy sentences, whilst other times she didn’t need much prompting. She’d shift rapidly, day-to-day, between a gentle, wistful expression to rolling her eyes or snapping a glass stem at the thought of him. She was wound around him so tightly, and he had made sure she couldn’t function when he was gone. She was impossibly strong to survive him with something of herself intact, though she admitted herself (only on dark nights when Mischa visited when they both had been otherwise undisturbed for weeks) that she knew some part of her was missing. Mischa’s father had taken something with him when he died, and not in any sort of romantic or nostalgic way.

Once, she confided: “He tore me out of my life. I hated it, my job- those sexist, elitist pieces of _shit_ \- That didn’t mean I wanted to go with him, either. He was captivating and he knew it, but I fought him every day because it was just a trick. He wanted something, and when he wanted something he rearranged the world so he could have it. I clung onto what I knew of myself, and prayed every morning he hadn’t stolen anything from me when I was sleeping. He tried to make me into a memory, and I always thought he’d failed. But look at me now.” She lived in a cage of her own creation, in a warm climate and a foreign language with an empty kitchen. He had her as petrified and isolated as Mischa had made herself, and though they loved each other, the misery and resentment only multiplied when they breathed the same air.

“I would have followed him everywhere. I think some people expected me to follow him down there, too.” She pointed to the floor, and laughed. “I won’t let myself burn just to see him again.”

Mischa wondered if other children had these sorts of conversations with their parents.

“He would have loved you,” Mischa’s mother told her, as she was dropping to sleep under the influence of too much expensive wine from a cellar her father would have cultivated. “If he could love anyone again, it might have been you.” Mischa spent that night on the floor, next to the couch where her mother slept curled up, and watched the cold moon from the window. It was a cloudless night, and she felt comfortable under the bright glow. With the sky so bright, there wasn’t anywhere to hide.

-

Worse than the isolation, than the fear, were the rarities.

Sometimes, not often, there came people that upset her more than those who are scared of her, because they wanted to _talk_. Mischa could barely keep herself together around them, not because they were necessarily unpleasant (though many were), but because they asked her questions she had no answers to, and then proceeded to take offense when she couldn’t immediately recall every detail from a murder scene from 2004, where skin was flayed and livers were stolen. She had stayed away from old newspapers and pictures for a reason. She hadn’t been able to sleep for a week when she’d found a clipping about an incident where a man had been found without the organs used in her mother’s favourite dish, when Mischa had been four. She couldn’t bring herself to eat anything more than a slice of toast until she’d spoken to her mother, who’d confirmed they hadn’t been anywhere near Tuscany at the time.

These people, who found her interesting rather than demonic, possessed novelty with a short half-life. Eventually even her loneliness couldn’t compensate for their devotion; those who spoke with reverence about a man who deserved nothing less. These were men who had a strange glint to their eyes whenever they opened their mouths, or women who’d clutch Mischa’s hand and move their mouths with a sympathetic click that wasn’t for her suffering but his. They didn’t know much about him, but they _knew_ his life had been difficult. To do what he did, of course it was. They understood, they all said. How could they, when even Mischa didn’t understand him. His own blood was alien, whilst strangers acted like kin. 

-

She’d found, by sheer luck, someone normal and open-minded. Not typically handsome, with drooping brow and large smile to balance, but wonderful in his own way. Mischa felt warm with him, having met him by accident, found a friend who came around unannounced with food in Tupperware and cheap alcohol for a night of talking and bad TV. His name was Terry, and he cooked, which was all her mother needed to know to dislike him.

“Everyone cooks,” Mischa had defended, but her mother’s face was set and dark as she threatened to fly over that night with a loaded gun. “It’s only lasagne. I’ll ring the police immediately if I think the mince tastes like Mrs O’Conners.”

Her mother had been speechless, and Mischa hadn’t realised why for far too long. Later that night, her own words caught up with her and she immediately called Argentina, apologising profusely into the ears of a traumatised woman who’d replied: “Nothing new. He was always blithe about it, too.”

Mischa didn’t dare talk about Terry’s cooking again. Despite her best interests, she felt herself getting more comfortable, especially when he moved in and made sure food was in her stomach every day, three times a day. Mischa thought he was a godsend – a real person who liked infomercials and chocolate cake and distracting Mischa from her canvases.

It came to light later on that he was one of the few who didn’t even know, who didn’t associate her face with his crimes. Who didn’t think of a monster every time Mischa signed her name.

-

Mischa measured her enjoyment by how much something was an issue, and _issue_ was defined as something that reminded anyone of her father. Taking into account who he had been, clever and varied and perpetually _bored_ , Mischa found herself constantly crossing out one thing after another.

Music was, as far as issues went, a minor one, so long as Mischa could sing along. Where she couldn’t cope with orchestral pieces that she associated with Vienna, Austria, or Budapest, Hungary, nor the endless piano pieces that reminded her of long journeys, Mischa found that if she could sing she could listen to just about anything.

_I never heard him sing_ , Mischa knew her mother had told someone, though it hadn’t been her. She might have made it up, if only to stop her own flinching. _I don’t think he had enough emotion for it._ You could trick an instrument into thinking you had passion, but not your own lungs.

Mischa tried to sing, and found she wasn’t bad at it. What she lacked in discipline she made up for in heart. She knew she was trying to chase something away with every song she sang along to, but it had never bothered her mother, who would shout lyrics to the ceiling when she thought she was alone, stomp her feet on the floor with the rhythm. Like chasing out a spirit, cleansing the house of evil.

-

“There’s a documentary on,” Terry said one night, flicking on the TV and handing her a plate of pasta.

Mischa was smearing the sofa with chalk, covered from face to tiptoes, having spent the day at a parade of street art, so was feeling generous enough to let him choose the channel. She felt honestly good for the first time in a long time; having given out bird-shaped business cards using the name _Starling_ as a persona, and shook hands with fellow creators. She’d drawn a scene from memory of the Eiffel Tower from the very top, with Paris sprawled in every direction so far down below you could feel the vertigo. She was floating with her minor success that evening and didn’t even ask as he switched over to _History_.

Her mood plummeted in one heart-stopping instant, when faced with a screen full of blood and body parts, whilst the words _Hannibal the Cannibal_ creeped across a blood-red backdrop. Mischa worked up enough of a breath to shout, “No!”

“Oh, come on,” Terry told her, nudging her excitedly. “They say that he’d killed over two-dozen people, and that’s the ones the police _know_ about.” He held the remote out of Mischa’s reach as a solemn narrator started to talk over pretty pictures of typical Baltimore scenes; the quiet streets and empty expanses of sky. “Apparently he ran off with an FBI agent and was _never seen again_. He might even still be out there.” He’d put on a voice, like he was telling a scary story around the campfire, and Mischa could have hit him.

“He’s dead, you idiot.” Mischa was sharp and angry. “He got shot twenty years ago.”

Terry stopped, stared at her confrontationally. Said, “You’re shitting me.”

“Even if I wasn’t, he’d be like ninety years old. I’m not scared of a ninety year-old dead psycho.”

Terry was still squinting at her, like she was lying. Huffing, Mischa made a dismissive hand-gesture that almost tipped her pasta bowl onto the floor, sat back in her seat and stabbed her fork into her food. “If you don’t believe me then watch your stupid show. It’ll tell you.” It might also tell him other things, Mischa realised only after she’d given him permission, only after they’d covered the Cheaspeake Ripper’s crimes in Baltimore and moved onto the spree across Europe both before his incarceration and after the break out under a decade later. It might tell him the names of the people he’d left behind, one of whom was sitting on Mischa’s sofa with a plate of half-eaten pasta that had been left to go cold after the third bad mug-shot.

She wasn’t listening to whatever narrative was used to string together the hour-long version of a man’s entire monstrous life, instead caught up with the grainy images of bodies on mortuary tables, or eyes that were completely black in dim lighting. A young man circled in a graduation photo, or a straight-backed professional at the opera. A thin smile at the camera, no matter who pointed it at him; the _entertainment_ column of the newspaper, or the police photographer. An empty cell, with detailed sketches of Florence on the wall. Mischa found herself cradling her jaw when a snapshot caught his profile, hiding her own from Terry’s eyes.

There were restraining orders set solidly in stone that her mother vigilantly pursued. Margot Verger’s borrowed lawyer was living off a steady pay-cheque with how often he’d be called with requests to _destroy anyone who wants to put my name out there; who wants to publish Mischa’s name_. In the end, Mischa didn’t have to worry, as they no more than glanced over the story of the FBI agent who disappeared with Lecter after he’d sawed opened the head of an agent of the Justice Department. “I bet she’s dead,” Terry said darkly. “What was she thinking?”

“That she’d die if she didn’t go with him.” Mischa answered. And her mother would have, she knew. Either he’d have put a knife to her throat and consumed her from the outside in or she’d have withered away with the same loneliness that ate her now from the inside out.

In the end Mischa was right, and Terry seemed disappointed by the end of the story, like it was nothing more than an anti-climactic fairy-tale. Hannibal Lecter had been killed in between the market stalls, Mischa had been six years old, and it had taken four policemen and too many shots to stop him. He’d bled out next to a blood-stained telephone, the narrator said. Of the five of them, he was the last one alive. He’d kept on attacking them even after they’d emptied their clips.

“That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever heard.” Terry told her. Mischa thought she remembered their house phone ringing, but knew it was just her memory playing tricks.

-

She hadn’t meant to do it, she’d say later, when she was somewhere unfamiliar and cold; dark and intimidating. “I didn’t meant to,” she’d tell them. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to-“

That was when it was so late it was early, and the story started hours before, when the couple downstairs were arguing and Terry and Mischa were doing their best to emulate them. Terry had thrown open the windows, yelling about Mischa being _unreasonable._ He lit a cigarette and leaned into the outside world. Mischa had stormed into her bedroom, too elated to be properly angry. They had yelled about misplaced Tupperware, she told the police later. “I’d left some at a gallery. Terry said I shouldn’t be so careless when I couldn’t always afford to eat.” Mischa had been delighted, after the initial heat had simmered into something lukewarm, since she’d never been close enough to another person that they’d argue over something so petty.

She’d argue often with her mother, the righteous old ditty about returning home. Mischa’s mother wanted her in Argentina, saying it was madness to stay in America. Mischa told her mother she was a coward for refusing to come back to her homeland. They’d argue also, once Mischa had been old enough to understand horror and second-hand blame and the full extent of how bleak the future would be, about how her mother had gotten into such a situation in the first place.

These were arguments that were serious, left them both furious and shaking and crying and devastated. A petty spat about plastic containers could not compare.

Terry hadn’t shared her delight. He wouldn’t even be able to comprehend it if she tried to explain, that the shouting, the resultant silence, the smell of smoke, was all a sign of normality and simplicity. Mischa had emerged from her room smiling, and she would later scold herself for being surprised at Terry’s still severe facial expression.

“What are you so happy about?” he snarled, making her own smile slide from her mouth.

“Nothing,” she told him sharply. “Am I not allowed to be happy?”

He huffed, turned away from her, whilst she moved to the kitchen for coffee. “Do you want anything?” she called out to him.

“No,” he said, closer than she anticipated. He was standing at the doorway, fists clenched and eyes dark with anger. “No, we haven’t resolved anything, you don’t get to move past this.”

“What do you want me to do? I’ll buy you more Tupperware.”

“That’s not the god-damn problem!” he yelled, and the sudden shift to raised voices startled her. He advanced forward, and Mischa didn’t have space to move backwards. She would only later analyse the fear that spiked through her violently and unprompted. Terry had never been violent, had never indicated that he may deal her any sort of harm, and yet she still cowered away from him when he tried to move close.

She’d held her hands out to stop his approach, but he just batted her away, stepping into her personal bubble. He didn’t drop his voice, but tried to look her in the eye. She refused, mind fuzzy with panic, the noises in her ears shifting and blurring until everything was static. He grabbed her chin to correct it, not harshly, and she hadn’t even noticed that his voice had dropped, or that his eyebrows had creased and the anger had slipped into worry. She was only aware of an unwanted touch, and her own hand moving to stop it.

She grabbed his fingers, twisted his hand hard. He moved with it, his mouth forming into a shout she didn’t hear, and something reminded her of this exact same moment, years ago, when she was in a delicate stone house south of Siena, and she was standing at the open door staring at a surprise visitor. There was a beautiful dark-haired woman behind her, pointing the visitor’s own gun back at the stranger, and a child peeking from around her bedroom door. Mischa loomed within the doorway, taller than she’d ever been, menacing. She watched a man who had taken a single look at her face and drawn his weapon. He was now entirely at her mercy with his wrist angled in her grip, and his face very close to her teeth.

“Mischa,” she calls out, and the name sounds like music in her lilting accent. “Close your door, please.” The little girl doesn’t hesitate, because Mischa could feel her own expression, frozen over with fury. Behind her, the woman’s eyebrows were scrunched together, conflicted, her knuckles white around the man’s gun, and neither of them had ever forgotten what it felt like to hold a favoured weapon, or use it to take a life. Mischa wondered if she should give her companion the pleasure, but here stands a man who has tried to invade her little world, has encroached on the peace and freedom she has prized, and now she will make him pay for it.

Mischa is found years later, back in her flat in America, hiding behind the shower curtain. “Holy fuck!” she hears a young policeman exclaim before they come to drag her out, and, “Where the hell is his… face?” Mischa tries to throw up, puke the content of her stomach down the drain, but the noise draws their attention and she can’t speak through her own gasping.

-

After that, she finally met him. Her mother had mentioned him off-hand once or twice, and Mischa knew him only from what she’d read in old newspaper articles and blog-posts. He had big eyes with heavy lines around and under them, and he used them to latch onto the buttons at her neck.

“Good god,” a woman said upon introduction to Mischa’s face, just as Will Graham was about to speak. Smiling, in a way that was more a mangled sneer of twisted lips, aiming for polite rather than pleasure, Graham spoke with a gentle voice, whispering like they might be overheard: “I would have preferred to start with, ‘good morning’.”

“Sorry,” the woman replied, sitting down heavily and holding out her hand for Mischa to shake. She was younger than Graham, a few decades older than Mischa, and she wore a brashly coloured scarf around her neck. Mischa politely took her hand, didn’t need an introduction: Abigail Hobbs, the daughter of a serial killer. Mischa hadn’t meant to latch onto her story like she had, but there had been desperate years when she was first alone in America and avoiding her mother’s calls and all Mischa had needed was someone kindred. And here the kindred stood, and Mischa was struck dumb with speechlessness.

“I was hoping we wouldn’t meet,” Graham spoke with his half-voice, gesturing towards the tinted glass behind him where police and FBI were staring in. “They can be persuasive.”

“They strong-armed him.” Abigail provided, louder and hollow, the echoes of an empty cave. “Me, too. They strong-armed me.”

“They want to provoke a reaction,” Mischa guessed, unable to look away. Abigail was bright and alive, cheeks flushed pink and eyes pale like Bolivian salt plains. Abigail agreed, “They’ve done it before.” She was so different from Mischa, and morbidly she wondered how much of Abilgail’s father was in her smile. There was a pervasive restfulness about her, a serenity of mind, and Mischa was jealous of the sparkle of her teeth and the laugher lines about her cheeks.

Graham, on the other hand, looked dreadful. Whatever boyishness he’d have boasted for years long passed his youth had finally dissipated, and he looked withered and tired and clever. Grey hair, clenched fists to hide his shaking, and already knew too much. These people had known her father better than she had, and worse still they could remember. She often protested any reminder, because she had thought she might pursue medicine until she _remembered_ , or that she could utilise her interest in psychology, until she _remembered_. She recalled nothing more than what had been told to her, whereas others remembered more vividly and unprompted, more ferociously, and she had never once been envious of their memories.

Now, she was within touching distance of a man who may have once looked something like her mother, with a similar wildness to them both, the same square jaw, and differing tongues that were nonetheless heavy with warm American accents. Her father admired few and with great discrimination, but he rarely let go what he prized. Here was the one that got away. He was a survivor, like she was trying so hard to be.

He weighed her up as well, and she could only imagine what Will Graham saw in her. Perhaps she had his nose, or perhaps she had picked up some sort of mannerism in how he would have sat in his chair. Graham looked especially at her fingers, fidgeting, restless, before finally meeting her eyes.

“You’re an artist,” he said, unsurprised, whilst Mischa wished she could hide her hands under the desk; thwarted by the handcuffs which were at least not a straight-jacket. Her mother had a drawer full of sketches, and yet had no pencils or charcoal or paper, and so Mischa had extrapolated and hoped details like that had been left out of the newspapers. She could sell with a mystery name, and no one had to be any the wiser.

“I didn’t go to school,” she answered when he asks where she was educated. “I was home-schooled until I was six-“ and Abigail makes a noise then, _of course_. Will ignored her, nodding gently, because only _of course_. “And my mother tried to get me into a lovely school in Lugano, but I wasn’t capable of maintaining a charade. And then we were brought here, and I was given tutors who were petrified or angry, and the FBI,” and she glares now into the musty glass, because they would be glowering at her equally as ferociously. “They didn’t want me anywhere near other children.”

“They were scared of what you were capable of,” Graham says pointedly, sliding a picture of a man with a face even more disfigured than his own, wired up to hospital equipment, onto Mischa’s side of the table. “So once you could leave education, you did so without another thought.”

“I have money. An inheritance,” she clarifies eventually, as her words are slow and her attention enraptured by a second, strangely coloured picture of her own kitchen cupboards and the slant of tile. Then back to the first, of a hospital bed, bandages red with oozing wounds. She reaches to touch it, recoils when Graham and Abigail catch her in the act. “My mother lives off what my father left her.”

“A tidy sum, no doubt. Not as much as he would have left you.”

“I don’t want his money.” But she so often needed it. She would never be successful or prestigious, since her father’s name would be more infamous than she could ever want to be. It stained her future black, and not even she’d want to go near her own hot mess.

“All my father’s money was taken from me,” Abigail told her, face twisting unpleasantly. “But I guess Hannibal was always affluent. He probably had fortunes stashed away.”

Mischa flinched. So few people used his name around her, and though Graham noticed her reaction, Abigail didn’t.

“He had a great deal of money put aside to compensate the family of the victims.” Graham said carefully, avoiding addressing Mischa’s father by name as if to apologise for Abigail. She didn’t know if she was thankful for his consideration. “He was careful about how he structured the future for you and your mother.”

“Should I thank him?” Mischa asked bitterly, though she knew Graham hadn’t meant it as a compliment to her father. His eyes were solemn and withdrawn and they were steadily making their way up her face. They were on her chin, then her lips. They had yet to travel further north.

Abigail didn’t have anything else to say on the subject of money, nor Graham, and certainly not Mischa. She pointed to the photo of the hospital bed. Asked, “Is he going to die?”

“No-“ Graham started, but was cut off abruptly.

“He’s going to be about as pretty as Will, though.” Abigail had a bright morbidity to her voice that Mischa would come to discover was the norm. She was a woman who had survived horrors; not one, but two serial killers. Her own father, then Mischa’s. Whatever she lost as a child breaking through from nightmare to this semblance of confidence, with her colourful scarves and funeral heels, she made up for in her delight at the real world. Terrible things happened, like an occasional mauling, but Abigail Hobbs had seen worse.

“Can I see him?” Mischa asked, and whilst she directed the question to Graham, she couldn’t help but peek at Abigail through her hair. Abigail stared back, as if she understood.

“No,” Graham replied eventually, and it was a half-word that he struggled to pronounce. He knew – so keenly it may as well have been his emotion and not hers – that this was the first time Mischa realised the damage she had done. She recognised that she had disrupted a delicate balance, tapped into something primal and fierce, provided evidence for cynical agents and sociologists. She knew that her actions had led to something that could not be fixed; that the only true friendship she’d ever experienced had been massacred in her kitchen by her teeth. And now she couldn’t see him. Not that she expected he’d want to see her.

As an alternative, Graham suggested, “Maybe you could write a letter.”

-

_This is wrong. I don’t know what happened, and I don’t know how to explain, and I don’t know if you’d listen. I couldn’t think. I don’t think I knew what I was doing until you were lying on the floor. I was so scared and I don’t know why._

_I’m not allowed to see you. Maybe that’s better. I think they were right._

_I wish you hadn’t found out about me this way._

-

She’d crossed every word out a hundred times, tried again, couldn’t think where to start. In the end she tore the words from her guts and threw them at the paper, and all she could think was _I don’t understand_. She scrunched her eyes shut, pressed her palms into the sockets, tried not to smudge the ink as she retraced them with her fingers.

She found that, as upset as she was, it was the frustration that had her punching the walls and wishing she could scream. She lay down with the letter in one hand, and it was crumpled when the sun rose. She had slept, but only just. She passed it to the guard who refused to talk to her.

-

“Will this make the news?” She asked. “I mean about me, who I am?”

“I think that depends how good the Verger lawyer is,” Abigail replied, sitting in the seat provided outside her cell. She had laughed when they’d handed her a chair and Mischa had approached the bars. She wouldn’t say why. “Your mum’s coming up from Argentina, I bet she’ll have something to say about the press.”

“I wonder what she’ll say about everything else.”

Mischa had written a letter for her mother too, which would never be received. She had already crumpled it and ripped it and flushed it down the toilet. She truly had been stumped for words, besides _I’m sorry it turned out this way_ , and _doesn’t history always repeat_.

-

Will Graham came to see her too, in the afternoon. He told her that he’d personally overseen the delivery of her letter to Terry, correctly judging that it was something Mischa was paranoid enough to believe would never see its intended recipient.

“You have allies,” Graham said, though he was much more focused on the architecture. “There are times when all you need is someone fighting your corner.” He didn’t seem to like the walls. Mischa wondered what Abigail had found so funny.

“Thank you,” she replied, more habit than genuine gratitude. She hadn’t been entirely disappointed at the thought that her letter may mysteriously vanish into the garbage disposal. “Is he awake?”

“Won’t be for a while. He’s had major surgery to reconstruct his face.” Blunt and to the point, and Graham still did not manage to bring his eyes above her nose. Mischa couldn’t identify which she hated more; the intensity of Abigail’s ice-blue stare or the determined avoidance of Graham’s fickle gaze. Both were more unsettling than soothing.

“Is my mother here yet?”

“She’s arguing with a lot of people,” Graham confirmed, then his expression tilted with a one-sided smile. It made his face crinkle, and she believed that here was an honest emotion from a broken man. “Then again, she has been arguing with everyone since she found out about your arrest. I’m not entirely sure she’s put down the phone since she heard the news.”

“She shouldn’t bother.” Mischa leaned her head against the bars, let out a sigh that Graham echoed. “I don’t see an easy way out of this.”

“Do you _want_ an easy way out of this?” But Graham needn’t have asked, because he already knew. There weren’t many layers between the mask Mischa wore and the underlying truth. “You can’t punish yourself for his crimes, Mischa.”

She pushed him then, sinking low and quick down onto the balls of her feet and catching him off guard. In his surprise, his head jerked up. Through his thick glasses, his stormy eyes met hers. “These aren’t his crimes anymore, Mr Graham. This isn’t about him.”

Now that she trapped him, he likewise trapped her. They were caught for an undefinable amount of time, and Mischa felt it stretch forward and backwards through decades and generations, and she saw something move like the crumbling of a mountain as his tired face underwent a metamorphosis induced by realisation.

“Mischa,” he breathed, shaking his grey curls with his heavy, clever head. “It’s always about him.”

-

Her mother stopped talking into the phone receiver only after she’d rounded the corner. She stared with a hard expression, a pale face. She looked ill.

Mischa did not have to imagine what she looked like, with her hair stringy and falling around her face and blackness to drag down her eyes. She tried to stop her hands from fidgeting constantly, and took to clenching them instead, nails biting into her skin. Through her mother’s mobile phone Mischa could hear a concerned chattering, someone asking _Are you okay, Mrs Lecter?_ _Mrs Lecter?_ Her mother hung up. Stepped passed the white line on the floor, pressed up against the bars.

Mischa caught her mother’s hand, felt both her own and the familiar tips of her mother’s thin fingers draw down her face. She sounded choked when she said, “Hello, baby.”

“Stay behind the white line!” A security guard yelled from down the hall, and the woman shot back a string of foulness, thick with her homeland accent that made her words harsh to outsiders but warmed Mischa from the stomach outwards. It transported her back to days long lost, where her mother and Mischa sat alone in secure rooms, Mischa’s first time in America, and they read whatever blood-splattered children books the FBI could rummage from the evidence lockers. Mischa hadn’t been scared because her mother had exuded a secure, weighty solidness. She was so immovably undisturbed by their situation that Mischa knew they’d be alright. 

Mischa wished for the illusion that her mother had once held; that childish perception of the invincible superhero, who could move the world to her whims. She wanted her mother to step straight through the bars and wrap Mischa in a safe cocoon in which reality could not pervade. Instead, her mother’s eyes were soft and bright and full of love. Mischa hadn’t realised how much she had missed her, how much she relied on her, until they were face to face. They spoke often, over the internet and phone calls and the occasional postcard from whichever country or state either could be found in, but Mischa hadn’t seen her mother like this in months. She regretted, more keenly than she had ever felt in her entire life, that these were the circumstances that led to their long-awaited reunion.

“Oh, god,” she said in return, because she could only imagine what her mother think of her. She contained a dark depth that was never allowed to show through, except under extreme duress. It was made from the same stuff that had punctuated her true desire to run across the world with Mischa’s father. Mischa theorised it must taste like the same poisonous swill that had propelled her into a domestic massacre; something unspeakable, indescribable, that consumed her whole like panic and ecstasy.

She was apologising, Mischa realised, whilst her mother gently shushed her, and their roles were once again played by terrified child and heroic parent. Suddenly, Mischa’s eyes were dripping wet, and every human part of her burst back into life. She hadn’t recognised the depth of her disinterest, her numbness, until it had broken. She cried, for the first time since she had hidden in her own bathtub. Her mother wiped them steadily, patiently, from her cheek.

“What’s happening to me?” Mischa asked, whilst her mother shook her head.

“Will Graham said he wanted to help. I think he knows something we don’t,” which was a distant but lingering thought that would keep Mischa’s eyes open throughout the quiet night. For now, however, there was only one person she could focus on. “We’ll get you through this, darling. My sweet baby girl.” She gazed at Mischa for a long moment, and Mischa wondered when she had gotten so tall. She was above her mother by a head, but felt as if she were only an inch high.

“I’m scared,” she admitted, but it wasn’t fear of the court or the public or Will Graham or even what she had done. It was fear that they would never escape, after all. Perhaps her mother had never been so naïve, and certainly Graham hadn’t, but Mischa had fallen for the foolish notion that the past should remain in the past. That spectres could only haunt you if you let them. That the dead no longer had agency on the plain of the living.

“He can’t get us here,” Mischa’s mother promised, but it was a bare-faced lie. Mischa could feel his touch over where her mother cupped her cheek. He could feel his eyes trying to catch hers. He was, even now, twenty years since they had last seen him, standing right there in the room with them.

-

When Graham started to ask her about memories, Mischa had no reason to lie. She’d thought about it, twisting her tongue over what she remembered as she bit into Terry’s face, but came clean when she knew her mother would have bullied her way to the other side of the one-way glass. She spoke about the open door in Siena, the gun in her companion’s hand, the little girl hiding behind her door.

“I don’t know what that means,” she finished, whilst Graham took off his glasses long enough to wipe them, chest heaving under his ratty jumper. Mischa pretended not to notice.

“Where was your father at the time?” He asked, correctly identifying the woman Mischa remembered as a younger version of her own mother.

“I don’t remember my father at all,” she said, having already told him so. Conversations about him always, inevitably, found their way there. Mischa had gotten into the habit of beating it to the punch.

“I don’t believe he’d let you forget him,” Graham murmured bitterly, as if he had not intended to let her hear. Mischa let him think she hadn’t.

When pressed, she admitted that not all her childhood memories had been obliterated with time and repression. What remained however were messy, dotty recollections of travel and heat and cold and the stench of Europe mixing with America. She especially remembered that first major journey, the day after her father’s death. She remembered screaming, pounding at the window with her little fist, eyes overflowing with tears.

“He’s gone, sweetheart,” her mother told her, repeating it so often that Mischa could still mimic the intonation. “ _È morto, bambino_ ,” she told her brokenly. “Baby, he’s dead.”

Her mother couldn’t have known with any certainty, since she didn’t see any body until long after they’d abandoned their home, but Mischa had believed her. She had cried and she had screamed, but she had never doubted. Her grief was bereavement, not denial.

“You remember the day your father died, but nothing before?”  Graham clarified.

“Maybe I blocked it out.”

Graham pulled a certain expression, a pained grimace, as if there was nothing else he’d like to do better than to block out her father. She already knew there was too much history between them to ever fully be understood, but for a sharp, stinging moment she wanted nothing more than to split open Graham’s head and spill all the pain he had suffered onto the table between them. Perhaps then at least one of them might sleep better at night.

“You’re standing at the door,” he reminded her, eager to get back on track and not to linger on a distant but inescapable past. “You said you are looking down at yourself, calling your own name.”

“I know it sounds crazy-“

“No,” Graham interrupted quickly. “It doesn’t sound crazy. It sounds like someone else’s memory.”

Mischa tried to hide the fear that pierced through her by scoffing. “So I’m a psychic now? Stealing memories?”

Graham tried his version of a smile, amused by her quick displacement of attention. A survival tactic Mischa employed to steer people away from topics she was uncomfortable with. One he recognised based solely on shared experience. Then it died as quickly as it appeared, and his face was the same solemn mess she had started to memorise, fascinated by the potential stories behind each white criss-cross across his skin. She wanted to know, with a second wave of gasping desperate need that she struggled to hold down, which ones had been made by her father. She itched to touch the long, thin line hidden under his fringe that was almost lost beneath the creases of his forehead but stood out vividly against the his sun-roughened skin, or catch sight of what exactly pulled so hard at his shoulders that made his posture so appalling.

He said with his usual quiet, grave tone, “Your father was fascinated with memories; retaining and changing and taking away. There’s a book on his unorthodox methods by-“

“Frederick Chilton,” Mischa finished for him, smiling with her teeth when Graham couldn’t help his own wince; it wrinkled his eyes and made him look old. “I know. He’s done a whole collection in the name of my father.”

“They’re all varying shades of lies,” Graham admitted, but then pointed to his left shoulder. It was like she had projected her will onto his, or more likely that Graham had read her interest across her untamed expression. “I have a scar here from the first time I tried to attack your father. Another here,” and he drew a line across his stomach, “From where I went fishing. We accumulate scars with every step of life,” and Mischa thought about Abigail Hobbs and her scarves, or the destruction of beauty that had been Will Graham’s once symmetrical face. “Some are more visible that others. Dr Chilton has more scars than any of us combined. He was shot through here,” and he pointed to the only side of his face that wasn’t etched with vivid, hard scar tissue. “By a woman who had been held captive by the Chesapeake Ripper. A woman who positively identified him as that man.”

He waited for her response, but she knew all this already. With his words, she also started to realise what he meant.

“How long had she spent with him?” She asked her new ally, who was becoming less and less scared of matching her eye to eye. Now, he was the one unwilling to look away.

“Only a fraction of the time he spent with you.”

-

Mischa knew that her father had made himself intrinsically a part of her life. She couldn’t even remember him, and yet she’d never forget.

It became impossible, as her mind misplaced the father for the daughter in the vivid recollections of events that had happened, but never to her. Even worse, when her dreams started to take on and shuffle through those same bright and colourful memories, and Mischa would wake full of warmth and love and joy.

At night, just for a moment, she’d experience a happiness she had otherwise never felt. Her life was not straight forward, or without strife. Her father’s life, if she were to take these new memories at face value, had been the opposite. As a man with no morals, he saw the world in simple terms: that which was beautiful, and that which was not. And by all the heavens on the joyous green earth was everything beautiful. Every day, Mischa had quickly learned the more she faced swinging pendulums and hypnotic suggestion, had been Hannibal Lecter’s newest _best day of his life_.

Dr Bloom was an old friend of the family, or so her mother told her. Dr Bloom smiled at them both as best she could, but her mouth was a thin red line and her eyes were cold. She was a survivor, and Mischa’s week amounted to the sole company of the people who her father had victimised.

Her mother insisted being with her at all times whilst she was outside the holding cell, gripping her hand too tightly or too loosely, and glaring at whoever sat on the opposite side of the table. She left only for Will Graham, who shrank like a wilting flower in her presence. The wife of Hannibal Lecter caused him to stumble over his own thoughts, mix up what he was feeling with what he had felt. Mischa was too high-strung to deal with him like that, when all he could channel were a stranger’s dizzying, topsy-turvy emotions about a man long since dead.

Dr Bloom was easier to confront, despite her range of terrifying expressions. She, like many others who had seen a mugshot on the TV or the front of a sensationalist crime novel, had frozen like a wild animal caught in the middle of the street when meeting Mischa for the first time, as if she were staring into the dazzling lights of oncoming traffic. She had recovered quickly and with grace, but Mischa had seen and her mother had scowled.

“I’ve been told that Hannibal messed with your daughter’s head,” Dr Bloom addressed her mother rather than Mischa, as if she were incapable or still a child. It was rude, and Dr Bloom didn’t pretend it wasn’t. It set off something ugly inside Mischa, which the psychiatrist was fully prepared for.

She addressed Mischa only when her face had been twisted by a snarl and she felt the disgust rise up like a wave inside her mouth. She wanted to spit out the tang of it, reconstruct it and replace it with something worth tasting. She found herself staring into Dr Bloom’s intrigued expression; one that balanced her professional curiosity with a trace of inevitability, as if, of all the emotions she could feel about Mischa’s situation, the most surprising of all was the lack of surprise.

“Well, he certainly did a number on you,” she said, and her stony face softened into something warm, like a hearth on a winter’s day.

“What’s happening to me?” She asked, because none of what Graham had hypothesised, no matter how many times she ran it through her tired head or tried to discuss it with her mother, felt real. The more she mused, the less sense it all made. Dr Bloom evidently had prepared her answer.

“Hannibal had a talent for manipulation, and used multiple tricks to twist the way the people around him perceived and remembered him, or themselves. He used illness, he used love, he used violence, he used hypnosis. In your case, he simply took advantage of your age. Children are malleable; as susceptible to suggestion as memories themselves. There are key developmental stages that your father personally oversaw, and likely used to insert his own influence on your life in an inappropriate and invasive manner. However you might have grown has been irreparably replaced by his directing hand.” She looked to Mischa’s mother, as if expecting some sort of reaction. Mischa stared at the table-top she remained handcuffed to, and all she experienced of that reaction was the way her mother’s hand tightened around her fingers.

Mischa felt as if she might be angry, but found that it was impossible when it made so much sense. More than anything, it gave her an easy excuse and might even pose as a simple way out of this nightmare. But Mischa had never been one for easy.

She considered Dr Bloom and her mother, who stared at her with expectation and even hope. She thought of solemn, shaking Will Graham and his searching eyes. It was his voice that she heard in her head when it told her that, this once, she might deserve the simple solution.

“This might account for a lot of what you’ve already told us,” Dr Bloom continued after a long stretch of silence, where something had been expected to happen but never did. Mischa felt herself only half-hearing the psychiatrist’s voice, following Graham’s voice backwards into a safer place, where all she felt was the warmth of her mother’s touch and another, unknown masculine tone soothing her with long, soft noises.

-

Mischa was cold. She stepped up to the window and drew closed the curtain, then turned back and stoked the fire. She was alone in the expansive room, chilly with its marble and endless columns, lit only by the flickering fire. A record was playing in another room, where her partner was reading.

Mischa moved forward on a light foot, tapping on a fancy whim to the gentle rise and fall of a Mahler Symphony, moving across the room with an easy grace that became her willowing figure, gave life to withering bones, brought a gentle smile to her aging face.

She was caught dancing alone, silly but delightful, by the company from the other room. She looked into her companion’s wide entrancing, endless eyes as Mischa’s large hands tangled with theirs. The best day of her life, she might have said or may have only thought. To add to the rest of them, her companion may have spoken or may have not.

Mischa felt the warmth around her, even when she realised she was alone. Neither was she in the arching palaces of places she’d never been, but in a cramped little cell. She moved around its restricted floor-space with the same ease as if she were in a ballroom, her feet imbibed with a memory of their own that Mischa had certainly never taught them. She closed her eyes, let herself sink back into the golden glow, pretend for another instant that she was someone else, and that she was not where she was.

-

She found herself again three days later, silent as the grave and briefly back in the harsh reality. Her mother had been calling her name, reaching through the bars, snapping at agents and security and anyone in the vicinity. Dr Bloom had been subject to the brunt of her mother’s frustration and fear, but was old and wise enough not to take any of it at face value. Mischa’s mother was only scared, and explained she had sunk down into a _memory palace_. Mischa could only comprehend it due to recent, elongated visits to the only location that would let her free. Her mother had enough experience with Mischa’s father to recognise the passage of inheritance. Hannibal Lecter was reluctant, Dr Bloom explained, to let his estate fall to ruin.

With the palace came the silence, which was harder for the good psychiatrist to explain. Trauma, she suggested. Feeling like she had been in danger had triggered the latent memories in Mischa that had stayed dormant for so long, but now she was overwhelmed. Stress, terror, revulsion, anger; all tumultuous emotions which clashed with the peace of mind Hannibal Lecter personified through a notable lack of empathy and regret. Mischa was stuck between two worlds: the first was her own reality, which was difficult to navigate and emotionally turbulent. The second was her father’s memory palace, which primarily concerned itself with delights and pleasures and festivities. The incongruent nature of what Mischa felt and what she remembered may have struck her mute, for now. _We’ll help her_ , Dr Bloom promised with her mouth pulled thin with determination.

Mischa’s mother tried to reach out to her in sign language, signing her name by first letter, then by all of it, then going through long-lost phrases and ridiculous nicknames that finally had Mischa responding, raising her own hands and sometimes meeting her eye.

“There’s an emotional breaking point,” Dr Bloom explained.

“That’s Hannibal’s coping mechanism,” Graham told the psychiatrist darkly, lowly. Perhaps nothing he said was intended for her to hear. Or perhaps he thought along a more complex psychological route. _She’s so determined to not be what they think she is_. But Mischa was beyond that now, and had accepted that she was exactly what they had always expected of her.

“It’s not your fault,” Dr Bloom would tell her, and Mischa would just close her eyes.

She wanted to say, “It wasn’t my father who bit Terry’s face off,” but she knew that this small group of kindly, troubled people wouldn’t accept that. The FBI weren’t the only ones looking for a monster under the wrong bed. Sometimes all the shadows held were shadows. Sometimes victims could be villains.

-

She saw her mother first at the trial, in a neat skirt and a tidy jacket. Navy, practical, with solid shoes to match. Mischa felt the disapproval bubble within her, but she’d become practised with Dr Bloom’s guidance at squashing stray emotions down. She tried to pull apart what she felt, categorise it into truth and conditioning. In the end, she’d settled for not thinking about it whatsoever.

Her mother was talking to someone animatedly, and Mischa would have believed she was yelling, but she could not hear her mother’s voice carry as it was prone to do in anger. She was not typically a woman who allowed her frustrations to get the better of her, but Mischa knew that her father had some sort of formative influence that could not be shaken: _You worry too much_ , about what people thought when they saw her, what they might do if they perceived her in the wrong way. Her mother could hardly escape that perception now. Now any frustration she kept to herself for fear of inciting rage in others became her prime motivation for letting it loose. See how angry she can be now that everything she had been scared of had already come to pass.

Mischa saw Graham only eventually, when the crowds started to thin, when the press had their pictures. He was flip-flopping between a hideous scowl and a smiler wider than any expression Mischa had seen him wear before. As Graham paused for breath, Misha’s mother gave her own story. They were talking about her father, Mischa knew with the same certainty that she was guilty and that her mother was returning Graham’s facial expression, though she could not see her face. They were happy, standing there in the hall and discussing a cannibal, a murderer, as if nothing else in the word mattered.

For the only time in her life, Mischa wondered whether she had isolated her mother herself by not remembering her father. They had nothing else to talk about, when her mother’s life had been swallowed so completely by the psychopath she followed across the world. Mischa wondered if it was a relief to her mother that she couldn’t remember, or a constant, ripping agony. _He might have loved you_ , she had once told her daughter. She had never said Mischa would have loved him.

But she did. She remembered living without him, and the clarity of the gaping wounds he’d torn into their lives as he left them both felt as fresh today as they had the day he died. Graham, with his aged face lined with pain, identified more closely to them than any of them would admit. He acknowledged it, as Mischa’s mother did, by telling stories and smiling and remembering what had been only in the dark or with family. Mischa watched them, and saw a kinship steadily brewing.

She was drawn to it, despite knowing the danger and the cause of her need to know. She tried to avoid all stories of the past, but the promise of a tale was a temptation, tugging at her relentlessly. All that stopped her from eavesdropping was the stern eyes of the guards and the handcuffs around her wrists. She imagined the gruesome scenes they described, then the glorious landscapes her father had treasured, then the games he had played.

The key players of those games were remembering all those old rules, reaching out to exchange ways to cheat the game. Once, Graham caught Mischa’s eye. Appallingly, like they were sharing a secret, he forgot himself and winked.

-

Mischa hadn’t known what to expect from a trial, but discovered how easy it was to leave. Retreating inside the palace she was beginning to renovate, she replayed a mental slideshow of her mother’s smiles, then of Terry’s laughter, then started down the empty corridors of a theatre before interval, listening to its hollow sounds, lost between the orchestra drifted out to meet her and her footsteps provided a metronome.

She drifted, did not expect any other outcome, recognised after the fact that the Verger lawyer and Dr Bloom had relied on Mischa’s new habit of escaping reality to in turn escape serious accusations.

_She was attacked in her own home_ , _scared of what he could have done to her,_ someone said. _She lived in a house where the worst thing that could happen to her was her father. Look at what he’s done to her. She’s traumatised. She sinks in and out of delirium._

_She needs professional help._

Which was how Mischa woke up walking the same steps as her father, and sitting in the same cell he once inhabited. The newest administrators of the BSHCI, the ones who had survived after Hannibal Lecter had gotten free, were as determined to reproduce history as her father. Her mother assured her he would delight in the symmetry.

In some small way, this reassured her. Perhaps he would figure her way out of this as well.

-

Mischa learned quickly that Dr Bloom had been comfortably retired since her father had disappeared from these so-called secure hospital walls. She returned only to see Mischa’s face, at the whim of her kind-hearted, determined wife, who had funded the softening of Mischa’s sentence. She backed away from the scene once more, until the BSCHI realised that Mischa was resistant to their attempts at rehabilitation.

They told the doctor that she was either closed off and angry or aloof and mocking. She upset them and unnerved them respective of her mood. Their report suggested she used her victimisation to ensure their sympathy, but would backtrack at the drop of a penny to secure herself in a position of intellectual superiority. One psychiatrist suggested that her father’s influence had enveloped her so completely that Mischa had developed a second personality. Dr Bloom immediately inserted herself back into Mischa’s therapy just to close her case file in all their faces.

_She doesn’t speak_ , Dr Bloom argued, when they’d told her what she had done.

_She doesn’t have to_ , they’d replied.

Mischa needn’t ask what Dr Bloom thought about that as the doctor was accustomed to having her theories listened to and taken very seriously. “You’re just flip-flopping, trying to see what fits. Will used to do it too.” Dr Bloom was careful to compare Mischa to Graham and not to her father, but she knew they amounted to the much same.

Mischa had a speech therapist that Mischa resisted more than anyone else. In the end, it was Abigail’s constant visits, almost every other day, that cracked a sound out of her. Abigail brought bright books to pass through, soft paper and wax crayons and mindfulness colouring books. She carried the conversation when Mischa couldn’t, made bad jokes, and it was not any particular defining moment when Mischa laughed; only that she had realised she had been listening and smiling and not sinking into her father’s mind for longer than an hour. She had been herself, and she celebrated with a surprised gasp, then a delighted cry that tore through her throat. Abigail had held up her hand for a high-five through the glass and had a guard yell at her for the trouble.

Meanwhile, her mother would have slept on the floor with one hand on the glass if she had her way. Graham didn’t come to see her at all.

-

He was a mess, she was behind a thick pane of glass in a desolate cell, and circumstances had changed so rapidly and so horrifically that Mischa was surprised they could recognise each other at all.

He sat at the chair as he was told to do, at a specific distance, eying the white line as if not even that could protect him. No one else did that anymore, as anyone who knew Mischa trusted her, despite everything else. They loved her, in their own way. On bad days, she suspected it was an extension of a long-lost love; that they were gripping onto her as if she represented only the good parts of her father. As if she hadn’t eaten the face off the man sitting before her now.

She glanced up from her colouring book long enough to see who it was, but otherwise left breaking the silence to him. She couldn’t comprehend why he was here, but was curious enough to refuse to scare him off by making the first move.

Eventually, Terry cleared his throat. Said: “ _Lecter_ , like Hannibal the Cannibal.”

“Astute,” she congratulated absently, still rather struggling with long sentences, contenting herself with short, if blunt, declarations.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

This was too complicated to string into an entire discussion, never mind a single sentence. In the end, Mischa dropped that line of enquiry; meanly hoped that he might be scared enough of her to allow her to direct the conversation.

“Your face,” she said, putting her crayons down slowly and sitting straight. She made a gesture around her own features to punctuate her words. “Does it hurt?”

“Sometimes. Looks pretty bad, huh?”

“Very.” Margot Verger hadn’t been able to look at the pictures of what Mischa had done, nor the result of the successful restructuring of Terry’s face, during the trial. He hadn’t been able to testify then, trapped in the hospital for a multitude of therapies that Mischa could only imagine.

“What the hell happened?” He asked suddenly, but caught the surprise on her face and continued, “I dunno, I mean I’ve just read what the news are saying about you. They say you were messed in the head, that I scared you by shouting. Did-“ he swallowed heavily, and she knew this had been torturing him more than anything she could have done. “Did I do this?” He looked at her cell, at her unmoving figure sitting at the table in the centre, and she looked back. He was smaller in his chair than was physically possible; an illusion caused by his bowing shoulders and his guilty expression. As if he wanted nothing else than to swap their positions; to spare them both of the fate he had come to believe he had inflicted on them both.

A wave of something reserved for her mother passed over Mischa. She felt both fond and conflicted, but the centre of this swirling emotion was confusion. Mischa rather thought it might be love.

“It’s not your fault.”

She let him sink down into himself, and respected him enough to let him cry. He wouldn’t have done this before now, content to struggle quietly at by himself. He would have taken the news with grace and appeared to everyone else to be peaceful. He wouldn’t have shown his pain to his family or his friends, nor shared with any of them his secret concern that perhaps he had deserved it. Mischa watched it happen in front of her, in the privacy of this corridor and the alien environment of this strange, harsh room.

He nodded at her the moment his gasping hiccoughs stopped, and the tears dried. She returned to her crayons.

“What are you drawing?”

She showed him.

After a while, he sucked in a breath and asked, without expecting her to look up from her artwork: “You gotta explain this to me: your dad, who was Hannibal Lecter, made you think his memories were yours?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell does that feel like?”

He surprised her with something no one had ever thought to ask. She spared a thought for Graham, who had disappeared from her life immediately after her verdict, and considered that of anyone he would be the only one who might understand.

She settled on a single word: “Bright,” and it wasn’t untrue. She started something new, and he watched her. She used the resettled silence to study him, picking up the colours of his skin and hair, the unfamiliar creases on a once-familiar head. This would be the last time she would ever see him, and though she would be unsurprised to learn this, Mischa didn’t realise it at the time.

Finally, he said, “What are you going to do now?”

Mischa shrugged, putting down the brown of his eyes, and showed Terry his brand new face. “I’ll start with an apology.”

“And then a shit ton of therapy?”

“Yes.”

“But, like, make sure they’re not a serial killer like your dad, yeah? You don’t want anyone else messing with your head.”

“Noted.”

When he cleared his throat for the final time, she found him edging the chair closer to the restrictive line that never kept her usual company away. She thought it had never stopped them when her father had sat here instead, either. He asked her, so quietly the glass almost stopped his voice completely, “Who is Mischa Lecter?”

Mischa gestured, a blithe movement she knew her father would hate on principle. She didn’t know the answer to the question, but found something akin to certainty here, in the place where she was so strongly reminded of all that had gone wrong for her, for him. It seemed like a fresh start. A new life. A terrifying journey where she would, for the first time, walk alone. “I’d like to find out.”

 

 

A man does not plant a tree for himself. He plants it for posterity. _Alexander Smith_

**Author's Note:**

> This was actually based off a post I saw, talking about how Hannibal would be a good dad WRONG
> 
> [Blog](http://www.space-leviathan.tumblr.com), [writing blog](http://www.spaceleviathan.tumblr.com).


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